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and nudged the boat close. The sailboarder jumped onto the Champion ’s bow and sprawled, catching himself on the guard rail. He used both hands, and his neck began to let loose small rhythmic spurts of blood.
    Bub threw the engine into reverse and opened the throttle right out. The boat chugged back, her flat stern making a wall in the water before it. The bloodied men were nearing the end of the pier. Bub shouted to get the sailboarder’s attention, then tossed him the gaff. The sailboarder caught it, but slipped on his own blood and went down on all fours. The bloodied men jumped. One went into the water. The other caught on to the Champion ’s gunwale.
    The sailboarder swung the gaff and began to poke at the man, while Bub roared, ‘Smash him!’
    The bloodied, smirking man began to clamber on board. But the sailboarder had a last adrenaline-fuelled burst of energy and stabbed the man in the face with the blunt end of the gaff, breaking his nose and tearing his cheek open.
    But the man simply ignored his injuries. He swung one foot on board. The sailboarder dropped the gaff and began trying to prise the man’s hands free of the rail. The man responded by sinking his already blood-smeared teeth into one of the sailboarder’s wrists.
    Bub rushed out of the wheelhouse and ran forward. For the next minute he tried to wrench the man’s jaw open. He pushed his thumbs into the man’s eye sockets, feeling gristly resistance, then wet give. The man would not open his jaws. Finally Bub got his hands around the attacker’s neck and squeezed. He waited for the man to let go—of his bite, of his grip on the guard rail. He waited for sane self-preservation, for a sign of pain or weakness, for the reassertion of what Bub knew very well about the world, even the frenzied world of battle—for Bub Lanagan had once been a soldier. But what Bub expected to happen kept refusing to and, finally, after he’d throttled the man to death he still had to extract the man’s teeth from the sailboarder’s mangled wrist; one tooth, having penetrated bone, remained in the arm after the attacker’s face—its pulpy eye sockets wreathed by broken blood vessels—had slipped beneath the waters of the bay.
    The sailboarder had collapsed. The deck was wet with blood. Bub knew he must get up. He must break open his first-aid kit and do what he could for the man. He must stand up and steer the boat, which was still chugging steadily backwards towards the mouth of the bay. He must get on the radio and find out what the fuck was going on.
    But before Bub was able to muster the strength to get up, the Champion became sluggish, and then her engine died. For a moment she coasted on across water as flat as that in a bird bath, in air that seemed weirdly airless, like the pressurised air in the cabin of a plane. Then Bub felt something comb through his frame. He felt warm, and numb, and his bones turned to wax. He sprawled, and the last thing he saw was that strangely subdued water slipping by, only a few feet from his eyes.
    When Bub came to he found the sailboarder lying against him, as if for warmth. Bub put out a gentle, exploratory hand and touched the man’s head. The man’s ginger dreadlocks were as thirsty as a sea sponge. Blood welled up under Bub’s fingers.
    Bub asked the man, ‘What happened?’ He waited for an answer, and for a moment he pretended that the sailboarder was still alive, that he’d managed to save him.
    Bub lay on his back, shivering, and staring at his hands. He touched his head. It felt fine, no tender spots. He didn’t know why he’d passed out.
    He sat up and scanned the town. There were several limp bodies floating in the water near the boat ramp.
    Bub decided to head around the coast and find help. He went back to the cabin, started the Champion ’s engine again, brought the boat about, and put her full ahead, aiming for the open